Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of Multinational Corps Iraq, meets with members of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team at Camp Liberty, Iraq, Jan. 10. During his visit, Odierno discussed current operations with unit leaders .U.S. Army photo by Sgt.Curt CashourFrom Time Magazine:
When Ray Odierno took over the top military post in Iraq from General David Petraeus in September, there was a lot of hand-wringing among folk at defense think tanks in Washington worried that he was the wrong man for the job. They pointed to Odierno's reputation from his first tour in Iraq, in 2003, as a heavy-handed division commander who had neither a grasp of the subtleties of fighting an insurgency nor the political acumen to sell his ideas back home. Some correspondents who covered Iraq in the months after the fall of Saddam Hussein also came away with that opinion; in his best-selling 2006 book, Fiasco, Washington Post correspondent Thomas E. Ricks suggested that Odierno's tough tactics in the Sunni Triangle had helped fuel the insurgency. Odierno's 4th Infantry Division, while hunting down Saddam and fighting off the remnants of his irregular fedayeen forces, flattened houses said to have been used by fighters and launched artillery volleys at insurgents hiding amid the civilian population.
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